Open letter to letter writer Geoff Barrington:
Aren’t you the intelligent one. First off, your childish and immature name-calling, “the greenies.” Maybe we should be calling miners “whiners” because that’s what they seem to do best.
Never happy, never satisfied, they have had a free ride for over a century to do as they please, and look where it got us: a legacy of garbage-filled, ruined, polluted land and water, and then left the cleanup costs to the taxpayer.
There are thousands of examples. Faro is a classic example. Secondly, you say the “greenies” want to protect everything; well, if you took your head out of the sand and actually looked around É and I am not just talking about the Yukon.
Think about the planet: everything can’t be saved because most of the planet has already been used, disturbed, polluted, degraded or destroyed (Alberta Scar Sands). The “greenies” just want to save some of what’s left.
If it weren’t for people and organizations like Karen Baltgailis and the Yukon Conservation Society we wouldn’t be living in a country with some of the cleanest air and water that’s left on this planet.
If you doubt the benefits of environmental regulations you might benefit from a field trip to a developing region. Countries with huge cities such as Delhi, Bangkok, Mexico City, Jakarta, Beijing, and Nairobi have horrific pollution because there are no regulations.
Millions of vehicles with no smog controls, thousands of uncontrolled factories, smelters, and mines that belch smoke and pollutants and turn rivers into open sewers.
The difficulty with assessing the real value of environmental regulations is that we haven’t experienced the consequences that would have occurred without them.
What kind of country do you want to live in?
We have an obligation to leave this beautiful little planet the same or better than we receive it, even with regulations we have failed miserably. And mining should not be allowed in the Peel Watershed.
Richard Oziewicz
Teslin